May 21, things happened

Today for me was mostly finalizing the new monster spawning logic, which is a huge departure from the previous way monsters were spawned. Now, monsters are spawned as part of “spawning profiles” which describe what monsters should be spawned in what conditions, and also in what density. The spawning profiles are then connected to biomes, and each biome can actively have a different spawning profile. This enables more interesting divergence of biome environments, because specific biomes (and detached sub-biomes, layers, etc) can have not only different monster types but also different numbers of monster types and densities and parameters, which was very difficult to achieve with the old system.

This is part of the effort to make biomes more unique, and to make it easier to have, as an example, a field full of bunnies appear in the middle of a forest. There will also be added weighting and just generally more configurable monster spawning to increase variety and make exploring more interesting. The previous system simply spawned X number of “things” around each player, regardless, and then what thing was being spawned was based on where the “thing” happened to fall, which is not too flexible.

The algorithm to spawn monsters around each player in a specific density per spawning profile is somewhat tricky, so it’s taken me a bit to work out how exactly it should work.

Other things today included helping omni with some item issues that needed sorting out and untangling a couple of messy bits of code, and also spending about 2 hours talking with the people setting up fiber in our office, getting information from them, and configuring our new internal network.

Hello everyone, It’s been a little bit since we gave a development update – I wanted to share the current status and our plans for Starbound over the next few months. Update 1.4 We started working on update 1.4 and the bounty hunting system late last year. We developed our planned systems and gameplay elements, […]

Hello Everyone, It’s been a few weeks since we checked in… Content Update The bounty update has taken a little longer then we’d planned. We’ve decided to deploy some of the content we’ve been working on in a smaller patch. This update will primarily be some fun things players can play with while we finish […]

Evening, everyone! I’m excited to announce that Poptop plushies exist now, thanks to the great folks at Game-Legends! Poptops look harmless and generally enjoy prancing around meadows while whistling sweet-sounding melodies, but they really don’t like adventurers invading their personal space. They were first designed by Starbound community member TomServo for the Monster Monster Contest […]